[TBS] List all merge fields and merge blocks

Hi,

For the purpose of my application using a lot of templates (about a thousand), I need to be able to find all the merge fields (and especially all the blocks and their fields).
I started by parsing the attribute Source of my TBS object with a lot of regex to catch all the [XXX] string inside but that seems just wrong.

Does the TBS object have a public method I can call to list all the blocks and fields ? Or is there a snippet anywhere that does the job in a good way ?
It would be great if the parameters of the fields (especially the 'when ... ' parts) were provided too

Sincerely yours,

GnsBeldaran

PS : I am using the latest versions of TBS and OpenTBS as of 2014-02-18 (the templates are .docx files)

Hi GnsBeldaran,

TBS has an internal feature for listing blocks and fields staring for a knowed name.
$TBS->meth_Locator_FindBlockLst()
$TBS->meth_Locator_FindTbs()
$TBS->meth_Locator_FindBlockNext()

Unfortunately there is no feature for finding blocks or fields for names that you don't already know.
BUT if you write a function that returns a list of possible names (for example by searching "[" and then ";" or "." or "]" ) then you can use the internal function for those names. Erroneous names will makes the internal functions to return an negative result but not an error.

Hi Skrol29,
Thank you for your answer,

Unfortunately my application stands between the templates and a bunch of views (about two hundreds) in the database.
It is supposed to find the template, list all fields and blocks in it, find a maximum of data in the DB and let the user fill the entries it didn't find.

It works well for now, but I am scared that my way to find them isn't sustainable
(I mean, I list all the fields with something like /(\\[(?>[^\\[\\]]+|((?1)))\\])/imsx, (I preg_quote the open and close tags) and then do a lot of jobs in it to find conditionnal fields etc...)

Well I hope there will be in future some parser or something to let you list those fields :)

Thank you a lot,

Belda

Can your explain your regexp ?

Hi GnsBeldaran,

It's essentially impossible to accurately deduce all unmerged tags.  You can have "[a][b]" and says $tbs->MergeField( "a][b", "[c]" ).

However, it is possible to detect a subset of them using regx.  I have difficulty applying the one you provided, so here is my example:


Hope this pattern is easier to read and modify.  To go further may require a real parser like TBS.

Yours,
Sheepy

Hey there,
I am sorry Skrol29, I didnt see your reply.

My regex was parsing the source to find all the square braces in the source : for example, if I have '[a.label][a.[b.colKey]]', it would return me ['[a.label'], '[a.[b.colKey]]', '[b.colKey]'].
But I have like 5 other regexes that I can't legally disclose that makes sure that at the end I have an array like this one :
['blockName' => ['val1', 'val2', ....']] (in my example it would be ['a' => ['label'], 'b' => ['colKey']]

There are some blockNames that are now reserved :
* 'choices' : block created after the parsing of the source to find all the [...;block=begin when [x] = 1] XXX [...;block=end] in order to know what is the paragraph conditionnaly displayed so I can have some radio buttons to let the user choose
* 'user' : user-related data (like his email, phonenumber, job, etc...) that are stored in the database
* 'entries' : data that have to be fill by the user (in a form)